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Wednesday Rapid Fire
- The DefenseTech “Iraq Dairy” blog is quite good.
- Thoughts on Roomba – I still need to get one.
- The long awaited car computer is almost here
- Global warming and it’s effect on celebrity reasoning.
- Southern English
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Trotsky
In one of life’s better ironies, the ice axe used to murder Leon Trotsky might be for sale:
But tests that could prove the weapon’s authenticity have been delayed by a dispute between the ice pick’s owner, who is shopping it around, and Trotsky’s descendants, who want it donated to a revolutionary museum — proving that the struggle between socialist ideals and capitalism is continuing.
The ice pick is in the possession of Ana Alicia Salas, whose father apparently removed it from an evidence room while serving as a secret police commander in the 1940s.
She is toying with the idea of selling the foot-long, sawed-off ice ax, though she says she hasn’t decided how much it’s worth.
Just a few blocks away, Trotsky’s grandson, who keeps the revolutionary flame alive by maintaining Trotsky’s home as a museum, says he wants the pick.
Trotsky helped lead the 1917 Russian revolution, but split with dictator Josef Stalin and fled to Mexico in 1937, accusing Stalin of having betrayed the revolution.
Stalin is widely believed to have arranged Trotsky’s murder, in which a young man posing as a sympathizer sneaked up behind Trotsky and sank the ice pick into his skull. Trotsky died the next day.
In this story you have state murder, theft, corruption, and media pretension all in one story, which is a very fitting coda for the Soviet experiment.
What gets me is the insinuation “Stalin is widely believed to have arranged Trotsky’s murder” when it is established fact that he ordered it. Oh well.
And get your “Axe Me About Communism” shirt here.
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Telluride
I have now been downloading the Telluride bluegrass festival (a legal download) for a day and a half now. It’s a legal download off of BluegrassBox.com. I’m surprised that someone offered it in it’s entirety this way.
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More thoughts on London
Instapundit pretty well sums up my view of the matter, but the whole business has led a few things to come to mind:
One thing absent from most analysis of the current world situation is the far reach of the community aspect (Ummah I believe) of Islam:
It is correctly used to mean the nation of the believers (Ummah Al-Muhmini) in Islam, thus the whole Muslim world.
In practical terms it takes the form of a meta-loyalty that competes with national loyalties (probably the reason the wretched term “Muslim-American” is used instead of “American Muslim”). I suppose the nearest comparison is the affinity of many American Jews for Israel, as well as the clamor for leniency for Jonathan Pollard. It also explains the attention given to Israeli treatment of Palestinians compared to the relatively scant attention given to all of the problems in Kyrgistan, Egypt, Sudan et al (in-team vs out-team)
For the most part though there is simply no matching comparison for Americans. Islam gives many Muslims a competing loyalty which Westerners have problems understanding but seems very natural to Muslims. This “team” aspect to the religion (a horizontal and not vertical faith, I’ll elaborate on that later) gives overlap to loyalties and goes far to explain the wholly inadequate Muslim response to terrorism.
In looking over this I see I shouldn’t post at 4:00 in the morning if I want to impress people with clarity.
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Technical Annoyances
I find out through experimentation that while my UPS is in fact working, it does NOT include surge protection (like every other UPS in the world).
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Updated Mapping
I finished my Geocoder/Ajax app and now my personal GMap is more fully automated.
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New gallery!
I just uploaded all of the photos Mark and I took last night.
The photos were taken at
- Howell Mill Drive, from the parking lot of some furniture store with a great view.
- A vacant but recently graded area that overlooked the new Ikea store. The grading made everything look like the surface of the moon.
- The park in the middle of the Atlantic Steel Mill project.
- The 75/85 overpass at the corner of Peachtree and Deering.
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The Wall Street Journal echoes me
While reading the diary of Eric Hoffer I came across his account of talking an old Russian emigre who claimed that the long-term effects of Communism in Russia was biological. To wit all of the people who were naturally talented farmers, managers and such were sent to die in Siberian labor camps.
The authors of Freakonomics make a similar point when discussing abortion and the dramatic drop in crime since the early 90’s. Their argument: unwanted pregnancies become unwanted children who are far more likely to commit crimes. Seems pretty believable.
I hadn’t thought of the crime angle but I had thought that the long term effect, or the Roe Effect would be, to quote the Jargon Database
An up and coming term; is the tendency of the “pro-life” people to have more children than “pro-choice” people. Since pro-lifers tend to be politically more conservative and they pass this political outlook on to their children. There are fewer corresponding pro-choice children to acquire pro-choice (an other) values.
Rather, legalized abortion will produce people who don’t support it. It is not an Evolutionary Stable Strategy.
James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal reaches my same conclusion before I write about it. Oh well.
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LA Times echoes A-Sides
In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans’ income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.
and
Any real solution to Africa’s problems must focus on the root causes of poverty × mainly misgovernment. Instead of pouring billions more down the same old rat holes, maybe the Live 8 crew should promote a more innovative approach: Use the G-8’s jillions 2 hire mercenaries 4 the overthrow of the 6 most thuggish regimes in Africa. That would do more to help ordinary Africans than any number of musical extravaganzas.
Oddly enough, Adam expressed the same idea, in nearly the same words last Sunday. Strange.
And as I do a spell check of this post, It tags “misgovernment” as a misspelling, and wants to replace it with “McGovern”.
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Three Things
- When all is said and done, I think the London bombers will be more in the mold of the Columbine shooters than the 9-11 attackers, just some maladjusted Muslim losers who are just “too real” for the world.
- It will be revealed that Middle Eastern countries are emptying out their prisons into Iraq both as a way to tie up US troops and purge their society of unwanted persons.
- On another note, I’m just got back from night photography with Mark as protection, we got some incredible shots, look for a new gallery soon.